


A Chance Encounter

by DragonGirl420



Category: The Walking Dead (TV)
Genre: Angst, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-12
Updated: 2018-12-12
Packaged: 2019-09-17 00:26:14
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,666
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16964313
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DragonGirl420/pseuds/DragonGirl420
Summary: Friends? Not really… but Daryl knows her from years before. Their tumultuous past rears its ugly head after an almost deadly chance encounter occurs, more than 500 miles away from where they had known each other. Will they put the past behind them and move on? Can their new lives find a way to cross amicably?





	A Chance Encounter

**Author's Note:**

> I needed to write some angst. Daryl was suggested and since I want to get used to writing this guy again… here you go. My poor attempt at Daryl Dixon. Dialogue Prompt: “Don’t act as if we’re friends. I know how much you want to slit my throat.”

He glared at you. It didn’t bother you at all. In fact, it felt like old times. Only now, you had to bare the weight of his gaze through the long tendrils of his hair that obscured a good part of his face. Not much had changed over the years, and even through the end of the world, Daryl Dixon was still able to bore into you with his steely blue gaze. Thankfully, it didn’t affect you anymore.

Too much had happened since you last saw him in Georgia. Too much blood had been spilled, by your hand and his, though not together. Too many men had tried to kill or rape you. Far, far too many. Apparently, too much had happened to Daryl, too. You felt like a wild animal who had been on the defensive for far too long, and that was just how Daryl lived his life. You weren’t exactly a match made in heaven back then, so you weren’t surprised at who you were together, now.

You tried to move your wrists within the constraints of the rope he’d expertly bound you with. No such luck. Daryl didn’t forget how to use the rope. Not even a little. A brief flash of memory from your years together as friends and caused you to chuckle, your expression slightly amused which aggravated him to no end.

“What’s so damn funny?” he growled and poked at the fire, his eyes slowly sliding in your direction.

“Nothing.” You turned your head from him, another gesture he didn’t care for.

“Now you’re gonna shut up? You ain’t stopped talkin’ since I met you when we were kids.”

You simply shrugged, but never looked back at him.

Daryl snorted in frustration. “Whatever,” he mumbled, and went back to tending the fire. The rabbits he had roasting over it smelled like a Thanksgiving meal to you at that moment. It had been days since you ate anything that didn’t grow out of the ground, and your stomach didn’t care who it was cooking it. Your brain, however, already told you that you wouldn’t eat what he was cooking, solely because you vowed to never take anything from Dixon, ever again. It didn’t matter that it had been decided before everything ended. It was decided, so that was that.

From the corner of your eye, you watched him carefully remove the cooked animals from its spicket, breaking off a chunk of meat and reaching it out to you. When you turned to see him fully, he was insisting you take it. In response, you held up your bound wrists and shrugged again.

“Thanks, but I’m a little tied up at the moment. Maybe later,” your tone oozed sarcasm, a trait of yours that only ever earned you a dirty look from your old friend.

“Fine. Don’t eat. But tomorrow, we when move outta here, you best be able to keep up. Don’t pull any of that weak ‘n tired bullshit.”

He tore into his meat without further hesitation and devoured his rations in no time. As you watched him eat, and blatantly ignored the guttural cries coming from your stomach, you started to wonder what he was ultimately going to do to you. Daryl wasn’t the kind of man who would ever consider raping you. Murder? Not his style unless provoked. But when you stumbled upon each other, immediately exchanging arrows and bullets, the discourse that already lived between you grew exceptionally. He’d gotten the jump on you, was about to put a bolt through your head, until he realized he knew you.

It was from a lifetime ago, but the recognition was there in his eyes. When you had the same moment, seconds later, the shock of it took longer to work through you. In that time Daryl knocked you out and when you woke, you were sitting at the base of a tree, hands and feet bound with rope and your old, lost friend silently poking at the fire.

“Thought you were dead, you know,” he started to say, then paused and waited for you to come around a little more. “Merle ‘n I both… we went lookin’ for you, for Scott… Shurl. Found them dead, didn’t find you.”

You didn’t speak. He waited for you too, but encounter had triggered the horrific memory of the road and the surprise of his face kept you speechless.

“Where’d you go?”

“Nowhere,” you rasped. Your throat was on fire, your head pounding. Daryl grabbed his canteen and brought it to your mouth, allowing you to take small, gulping swallows until you felt the pain ease away. “They were dead, but not, when I left ‘em. Shurl still had the needle in her arm, but her corpse was up ‘n walkin’ round…”

“Mmhmm,” Daryl agreed and watched you cautiously as he chewed on his bottom lip. “Thought she was done with all that.”

“The world was ending. I guess she said, fuck it.”

“So, where’d you go?”

“Ain’t your business, Dixon. Why don’t you just untie me ‘n I’ll be on my way. No reason we gotta try and kill each other. It was a mistake, thought you were just like the rest of ‘em out here.”

“Rest of who?”

“The men. The ones that see a woman traveling alone and think… ‘mine’.”

“That happen to you a lot?”

You turned your head refusing to answer. That’s when your last few moments with him came back to you and you hated him against instantly. From there, you didn’t speak to him and it made him angrier and angrier by the hour. It was by the next afternoon he took off and left in a huff. He secured the camp as best he could and left a small knife in one of your bound hands before going off to hunt. Just enough to kill one of the dead, but not to cut through your restraints.

Now, as you approached night again, and he tore into his kill of the day, you had still barely spoken to him, but he didn’t seem as bothered by it anymore. However, with your curiosity growing, you had to ask about his plans.

“What are you gonna do with me, Daryl? Why bother with me?”

“Now you wanna talk?”

“Fuck you. Untie me.”

“Naw… you’re staying like that for now. Til I know I can trust ya again.”

“Trust me? You never have trusted me, why start now?”

“Cause now its about life ‘n death. Just cause we know each other from before, it’s been a minute. I gotta know I can trust you before we’re friendly again.”

You laughed and laid your head back against the tree. “Friends…” you mused with a snarky laugh, and drifted back in your memory, for before when life was normal. Daryl Dixon had been a lot of things to you… bully, protector, partner in crime, pain in the ass—almost lovers, once… But friends was a very loose definition of what you had been.

**_“Don’t act as if we’re friends… like we ever were. I know how much you want to slit my throat. You wanted to do it then, and you still wanna do it now.”_ **

He narrowed his eyes at you. “That’s what you think, huh?” He nodded in understanding, but wore a look of digustion and stood up from his place near the fire. He removed the knife from its sheath on his belt and held it up to you. You didn’t flinch as he knelt in front of you; his face inches away and snarling in frustration.

“You’re so damn smart, think you know everything? Fine,” he grabbed your wrists and cut you free from the ropes; then followed suit with your feet. “There, you can go now. Good luck.”

He stood up with a grunt and put the knife back in its place. Daryl sat back down by the fire and started eating the second rabbit he’d offered to you earlier. The suddenness of his actions had once again stunned you into silence. You rubbed at the place where the ropes had dug into your wrist and watched him eat, wide-eyed and unsure of what to do next.

“I—I don’t know what to say.”

“Don’t say nothing, just go. Its what you want, right? You think I just wanna kill you? Rape you? What? That I’m some kinda animal—”

You scrambled to your feet and shook your head, still surprised by his letting you go. “The way things were when I last saw you… two days before the world took a shit, you told me that you regretted ever knowing me. That I was the worst thing that ever happened to you.”

He didn’t look at you, just went about working on the rabbit.

Despite the current state of things, the old rage still burned lowly in your gut. His nonresponse was frustrating, and made you feel slightly crazy, just he like used to. “I told myself I would never ask you for anything, ever again. I wouldn’t take your money, your pills, your help, your… anything! Now, all this time and bullshit later… we meet again, and you try to kill me.”

“You shot first,” he scoffed casually, as if that was reason enough.

“Your bow was raised! You know how many times I’ve been attacked out here?! Do you!? We’re five hundred miles away from home, how the HELL was I supposed to know that some asshole creepin’ in the woods would be you!!”

“All that shit was a long time ago, Y/N. You gotta let that shit go,” he rasped, his voice lower and more serious. “We lose people left ‘n right now. No room for past mistakes or grudges.”

You swallowed thickly, still rubbing at your wrists. Daryl was so different now, and that’s when you realized that he must have had his own set of horrors on the road north. “You’ve changed.”

“You gotta. Or you’re gonna die.”

You were silent for a minute, trying to decide what to do. Half of the rabbit was left, and you couldn’t resist the smell any longer.

“Still offering that?” you asked sheepishly.

Daryl snorted a laugh and shook his head as he held it up to you. “Take it.”

You cautiously took it and sat back down, closer to the fire. “What the hell are you doing up here anyway? Never thought you, of all people, would leave Georgia.”

“My group… we had to find a place, so we walked ‘til we did.”

“Your group? How big?”

He hesitated to answer, instead he continued to poke at the fire.

“What do you care? We ain’t friends anymore, remember?”

“I get it, I’m a bitch. But—”

“It’s fine. You were protecting yourself. I get it. But so am I. Protecting my family, too. I was gonna take you there. See if they’ll take ya in. But I think it best for you to just go on ahead.”

He seemed disappointed, at least that’s what you gathered from his tone. He had changed more than you thought, and some ways it was good, others, not so good. He was colder, much more distant that he was when you first met him all those years ago. But he was also stronger, now. The weight of his home life and brother seemed to have lifted a little, and now he had people he proudly called family. You searched his face for some recognition of the kid you knew back then and found a little. More than that though, you found a new version of him, this man that maybe was something you’d want to know again. A man you could trust.

“Daryl, I’m sorry,” you started to say. Drawing in a deep breath, you knew you had some contrition’s to make if this was going to work. “Back then, I did shitty things. We did shitty things to each other. I couldn’t get past my own demons to see yours. That last day… I didn’t sleep with Merle. I said I did to piss you off, I was testing you because I didn’t believe you really cared. I was so fucked up back then, we both were. It was toxic and dysfunctional, I know. But when the world takes a shit, it sort of helps you find perspective I guess.”

Daryl grunted in acknowledgement and cast a side-eyed glance your way. “Don’t matter anymore. Merle’s gone. So’s the past. No need to dredge it up.”

You nodded and felt a bit of relief. “Who would have thought I’d find you here. Out here, like this. I mean, what are the chances?”

“Slim.”

“Yeah… but, yet, here we are. So… maybe we can just acknowledge that, maybe put the past in the past, including me shooting at you, and you firing a bolt or two at me.”

“You’re lucky I missed. I don’t normally miss,” he said, but this time there was a hint of that old Daryl smirk there.

“Me either,” you challenged and decided to finally tear into the rabbit.

He watched you thoughtfully for a moment and tossed his stick into the fire. “So, you wanna try this again? More civilized maybe?”

You nodded again. “If possible.”

The rest of that night was spent catching up on how you got to where you were. Daryl recounted how he and Merle found a group, and what was left of them had walked all the way from Georgia to D.C. in search of a home. You were slightly vaguer, and just gave him the highlights of your journey. The details weren’t something you wanted to relive, and you knew that if you started talking about the place you were currently calling home, he would just have more questions you weren’t yet up to answering.

The sun finally rose over your make shift camp site. Daryl kicked dirt over the fire and slung his bow over his shoulder as he stood from the ground.

Daryl looked towards the horizon, reading the rising sun and gathered the rest of his gear. “Time to head home.”

“Yeah, it is. Please tell me you have my pack.”

“I do,” he said and tossed it to you. After a quick look, everything was there and you, too, slung it across your back. “So, you wanna come back with me? Give this a go?” he asked with a shrug. “I can’t guarantee they’ll take ya, but I think if Rick met ya—”

“Thank you, but no. I have a place. Its not far from here, and its safe.”

Daryl was quiet. Even though it had been years, you could read his body language and expressions. He seemed disappointed but nodded in understanding anyway.

“Alright. Long as you got a place to go. But, uh… if you ever need anything, just come back to this place. Leave something, I’ll find it.”

You surveyed the small camp site and smiled. “Same goes for you, Dixon. Be safe.”

“Mhhmm, you too.”

Despite the tumultuous back and forth relationship you had with the man for years, there was a part of you that didn’t want to leave. He was a part of home that you thought you’d never feel again. A reminder of a life you lived a hundred years ago. It wasn’t a great one, and most of the time you were miserable, but in the rare moments of pleasure or happiness there was, he had been there and part of it. To part ways with him again, like this, suddenly felt hard.

He waited for you to go first, which you did. You got your bearings and turned south to head towards home. Daryl’s eyes stayed on you until you disappeared into the thicket. Once you were sure he hadn’t followed you, you doubled back and headed West, the real direction of home… the one that lead back to the Sanctuary and the new life you had found with the Saviors.


End file.
